Sartre's second century

98 Chapter Seven
people. Besides the respective fact that each happens to be talking, there is
the mutuality that we call the conversation itself that exists beyond the
being-for-itself of each participant, though not independent of the individuals
involved. 29
Sartre alludes to two aspects of language that are of increasing interest to
current research. Spoken language, involving the speakers' co-presence
and interaction,
defines a property that can be called situatedness—the closeness language
has to the immediate physical and social situation in which it is produced
and received. The nature of conversational language and conversational
consciousness is dependent on their situatedness. 30
In addition to this dimension of situatedness or historical facticity, situated
discourse is framed by structures of intersubjectivity. At this point,
Sartre's thought in the Critique comes closer to Husserl's reflections on
the encompassing structures of intersubjectivity in consciousness's
experience of the world:
The most important factor to be stressed is that community is not a mere
collection of individuals and that communal existence and common
achievements are not simply collections of individual lives and individual
achievements. On the contrary, all individual existence and individual life
is thoroughly informed by a unity of existence, grounded, to be sure, in
individual lives, but a unity penetrating and transcending the private
worlds of individuals [...]. 31
Although Husserl goes on to make reference to "forms of life, work and
cultural configurations" and their corresponding "norms", his analyses are
composed of largely incomplete and programmatic texts. I have elsewhere
referred to these and other aspects of Husserl's views on intersubjectivity
and the relevance of perceptual, embodied experience to the understanding
of language as "envoiced subjectivity". 32
We may usefully engage Sartre's suggestion that language illustrates
important aspects of the practico-inert by considering specific aspects of
the envoiced subject. Envoiced subjectivity incorporates Husserl's account
29 Thomas Flynn, "Sartre and the Poetics of History", 216f.
30 Wallace Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and
Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing, 44f.
31 Husserl, Aufsatze und Vortrage, 48.
32 See Elveton, 'Tolerance, Envoiced Subjecivity and the Lifeworld."